The Sensational Absence in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

초록

Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White has enjoyed immense popularity since its first publication as magazine serials during 1859 and 1860. Along with such popularity, the novel has also received much critical attention and acclaimed as inaugurating a literary genre of sensation fiction, and has been diversely discussed in terms of how Collins simultaneously invented sensation fiction yet twisted its generic conventions by putting characters over plot. Accordingly, scholarly discussions have analyzed most of the characters as embodying Collins’s subtle and ambiguous attitudes towards political, economic, social, and cultural issues in the late nineteenth century. Those discussions, however, have persistently disregarded one particular character in the novel: Laura Fairlie. Rejecting critics’ unanimously dismissive treatment of Laura as a submissive, dependent, and timid Victorian angel in the house, this essay aims to demonstrate how The Woman in White is essentially indebted for its ceaseless popularity to her absent presence in it. To that end, the essay examines how Collins has Walter Hartright compile and edit multiple accounts of who Laura is by multiple characters in a way that at once keeps Laura’s identity unidentifiable from one specific perspective and available to numerous different perspectives. The essay concludes its examination by observing the unexpectedly sensational effect of The Woman in White on readers that results from Laura’s silent transgression of class and gender norms.

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